How is it possible to live in world where people can rule millions of others? It's incredible! It's like we've gone back to the 12th century. That's what happens when you decapitate intelligentsia and repeatedly traumatize and brutalize a country for decades on end: you do not get virtue. Victims do not make nice people.

I think it's deeply important for us to know, especially when we come from the outside, how "ordinary people" think and feel and what their expectations are and what their concerns are. Also what's in their imaginations, what's in their minds, even what their rumors are and what their gossip is.

How is it possible to live in world where people can rule millions of others? It's incredible! It's like we've gone back to the 12th century. That's what happens when you decapitate intelligentsia and repeatedly traumatize and brutalize a country for decades on end: you do not get virtue. Victims do not make nice people.

That's what's terrible about wars when whole societies adopt an impulse of objectification. Everything becomes black and white.

Che is not just a potent figure of protest, but the idealistic, questioning kid who exists in every society and every time.

I think in a sense this is a house that was built on a bad foundation. And the foundation was the Americans coming here and allowing the sacking, burning and plunder of Baghdad, for whatever reason.

If you're young and inexperienced you might accept what people tell you, that everything's going to be fine, it's okay. It's usually other young people saying that, who don't know any better. It's good to have a survival instinct because increasingly, especially in the whole Arab Spring sort of violence, you're mostly with young people who have not experienced what they're doing before.